Monday, November 17, 2014

Idles in Brackish Water Like a Tow Truck

Guess who I was listening to this past weekend.

I confess, it gives me an unseemly amount of pleasure that the local helmetball team sucks so much that lifelong fans are saying fuck it. I was going to write about a conversation with a friend with a I'm Ready for Hillary bumpersticker I had Saturday. I was going to talk about being fifty pages from the end of Gravity's Rainbow, how I bought Lispector's GH and Krasznahorkai's Satantango last Thursday and I'm having such difficulty deciding which to read first I'm having trouble finishing Gravity's Rainbow. I was going to bleggalgaze, Gravity's Rainbow of course the allusion in VNTY'SGRVYD, but let me go at least one more day before violating the rules of VNTY'SGRVYRD (though I think I can say - I will order myself to an inquiry to confirm or condemn - that the positive side-effects in one place can lead to positive negative - or is it negative positive? - side-effects in all the others). Instead, have some links, and wishes for nothing but misery for shitty Daemon Snyder.

Rainy Fascism Island: How to characterize this period post-crash, or post-post-crash if we
assume that the measures taken (austerity, the destruction of the
welfare state) have largely been set in motion, if not completed? The deliberate shifting of blame that saw the public sector punished
for the crimes of the private allowed various other modes of the dis- or
rather misplacement of resentment to be mobilized. The targets are the
same as they ever were—migrants, the un- or underemployed, those in need
of help or support—but, given that the structures that enabled help and
support had largely been dismantled even before “austerity” measures
were imposed, there seems little left to attack. Those outraged by
people receiving benefits, or those telling people to just get a job,
must know that what meager benefits there are do not support a life, and
that in many places there simply are no jobs to get. But nevertheless,
resentment remains, or at least, somehow, a fantasy version of it can be
mobilized such that resentment acts as a kind of looping device,
self-nourishing and ever-expanding. What should we call this state of
affairs? How best to identify it, in order to redirect or dismantle its
energies?

2 comments:

i)i really like the eschatology, piscatology poem, which considers both evolutionary and scriptural perspectives, and moves smoothly from halotolerant and diapsid (i had to look up the latter) to smug fucker

the topic reminds me of Lewis Carroll's poem, which was modeled after one by Isaac Watts:

How Doth The Little CrocodileLewis Carroll

How doth the little crocodileImprove his shining tail,And pour the waters of the NileOn every golden scale!

I give you now Professor Twist,A conscientious scientist,Trustees exclaimed, "He never bungles!"And sent him off to distant jungles.Camped on a tropic riverside,One day he missed his loving bride.She had, the guide informed him later,Been eaten by an alligator.Professor Twist could not but smile."You mean," he said, "a crocodile."